Assuming that checks out, does that means those positions were superfluous in the first place and replacing them were unnecessary, or is the President trying to make everyone there work themselves to death?

Trump is the natural result of a Low Information Voter becoming President. He doesn't replace people who give him contradictory information to his views so he's repeatedly removing people whose jobs were to keep him informed about anything.

There's a lot of acting people who are basically subordinates to the fired ones.

And this is being reflected in the job he's doing as President - he's doing abysmally. Naturally his approval ratings are dropping like a rock attempting to fly.

This is a President who believes he already knows everything that needs to be known, and is unwilling to entertain the very idea he might be wrong.

Advisers outside of his family are superfluous.

I think the closest I can liken this to is the downfall of WCW - wherein literally everything was given to one wonderkund, while Ted Turner was surrounded by Yes Men who only ever told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

Billionaire liberal financier George Soros offered some rare praise of Donald Trump's policies in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday, but said he's worried the president will undermine his own strategy.

Soros called Trump's policy on China, "coherent and genuinely bipartisan" as well as "the greatest - and perhaps only - foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration."

Specifically, Soros said the Trump administration was right to put Huawei on the Commerce Department's "entity list" as a national security threat, which prevents U.S. companies from engaging in business with the firm.

In the op-ed, Soros called China "a dangerous rival in artificial intelligence and machine learning" but said its ability to compete in the 5G market is seriously hampered by Huawei's dependence on U.S. companies.

"As long as Huawei remains on the entity list, it will lack crucial technology and be seriously weakened," Soros wrote.

But Soros said he worries Trump could remove Huawei from the entity list as a concession to China during trade talks. Soros said he believes Trump will want to arrange such talks in the lead-up to the 2020 election. While amendments have been introduced in the House and Senate to prevent Trump from removing Huawei from the list without congressional consent, Trump has sought to block that restriction, Soros wrote.

"If Republicans allow Mr. Trump to bail out the Communist Party-run telecom giant, they will be abdicating their most basic democratic responsibilities," wrote the 89-year-old billionaire, whose Open Society Foundations have helped countries transition to democracies.

The U.S. has long had concerns about Huawei, claiming the company has a cozy relationship with the Chinese government, which could use its technology to gain an espionage advantage. The Justice Department filed criminal charges against the company in two separate cases earlier this year, claiming Huawei committed fraud and stole trade secrets. Huawei, for its part, recently accused the U.S. government of using "unscrupulous" tactics to interfere with its business.

Huawei and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"You can hold one block can't you?"

FighteerGeronimo!
from the Time Vortex
Relationship Status: Dancing with Captain Jack Harkness

I'm not giving Trump kudos for Bolton's "firing". From what we're hearing, Bolton resigned. Trump told him, "Hold onto that resignation, we'll talk about it tomorrow." Then, the next day, Trump publicly announced that Bolton's being fired 'cause he sucks.

That, to me, says that Trump firing Bolton had nothing to do with the things people rightly criticize Bolton for. He did it because of the resignation. This was a "YOU can't break up with ME if I break up with YOU FIRST!" firing. Trump just wanted the public narrative to be "Trump gets rid of ungrateful asshole" instead of "Bolton quits his awful job under President Shithead".

I refuse to give Trump the pat on the back he's so transparently gunning for.

As for Trump just hiring someone worse, that's a crapshoot. Trump will hire the next person who says "That Trump guy sure does a bang-up job in office, and he certainly never committed any crimes!" out loud within earshot. This practice has historically resulted in a wide range of nominees between merely bad to batshit terrible, and on occasion someone totally unfit for their job but who will actually stand up for their department to Trump.

Bolton was batshit terrible, so there is a chance that the Random Praise Lottery will pull out someone who just sucks at a reasonable level.

And this is being reflected in the job he's doing as President - he's doing abysmally. Naturally his approval ratings are dropping like a rock attempting to fly.

This is a President who believes he already knows everything that needs to be known, and is unwilling to entertain the very idea he might be wrong.

Advisers outside of his family are superfluous.

I think the closest I can liken this to is the downfall of WCW - wherein literally everything was given to one wonderkund, while Ted Turner was surrounded by Yes Men who only ever told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

The result was, of course, disastrous.

Don't, uh. Don't get too excited there. There has been no "approval ratings dropping like a rock". That's not a thing.

Trump's approval ratings have been unusually stable throughout the course of his Presidency. It dropped off sharply in the first few months of 2017 when people realized he was serious about all that shit he said (and the Russia probe began). Then came back up a little with the tax cuts that closed out 2017.

But since the beginning of 2018, Trump's approval ratings might as well be a straight line. His aggregate ratings have been at 41-42%, almost never wavering. Individual polls will place him as high as 44% or as low as 38% on a regular basis. Anywhere within that margin is just standard Trump polling, but is often reported as "Trump rose to an impressive 44%!" and "Trump dropped to a major low of 38%!" because sensationalism.

Few if any Presidents have ever had polls that so belligerently refuse to change month over month. What this suggests is that the same is true today as it was last year.

The Diehard Trumpeteers will never be convinced to abandon him.

The wealthy plutocrats who were mad at him in 2017 got what they wanted with the tax cuts, are thus satisfied, and don't actually care about anything else he does.

No one else can be convinced to support him.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 11th 2019 at 8:13:59 AM

The greatest trick prejudice ever pulled was to convince the world it did not exist.

TheWandererStudent of story
from New York
Relationship Status: The new Mrs. Reynolds

President Trump spent his summer making war on Denmark, attacking Baltimore, destabilizing the world economy, sending an imaginary hurricane to Alabama and ousting his national security adviser, among other things. But while everybody was watching those fireworks, Trump’s underlings — some far more competent than he — were toiling in the shadows to hand over public lands to the tender mercies of oil and gas companies.

The scheme, rolled out over the summer, was ostensibly to put the Bureau of Land Management closer to the lands it manages by moving personnel out of Washington. That makes sense until you consider:

1. Ninety-seven percent of the BLM’s employees already are outside of Washington, and the few hundred in the capital do things such as coordinate with Congress and other agencies; now half the congressional affairs staff, I’m told, will work out of Reno, Nev. — 2,600 miles from Capitol Hill.

2. BLM organized this with cursory analysis of impacts and costs and no significant consultation with Congress, American Indian tribes or BLM staff.

3. BLM decided to locate its new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo., hours from a major airport but just down the road from the hometown of Interior Secretary (and former oil and gas lobbyist) David Bernhardt, who presides over BLM.

4. The relocation was overseen by Interior assistant secretary Joseph Balash , up until days before he took employment for himself with an oil-exploration company.

5. When Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) said it appeared that the proposal, which doesn’t have congressional approval, was a “deliberate effort to dismantle” BLM, Balash threatened Udall, saying he would “reconsider the relocation of additional Departmental resources to your State” in retaliation.

6. Many workers being shipped out of Washington are reportedly being offered lower-level, lower-pay jobs — confirming suspicions that the real purpose is to drive experts out of government and thereby shrink the agency.

Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said as much last month. “It’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker. I know that because a lot of them work for me, and I’ve tried,” he told a GOP gala. “By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to . . . move you out in the real part of the country,’ and they quit — what a wonderful way to sort of streamline government.”

Since Balash left to join the oil industry, the unenviable task of explaining the relocation to Congress fell to his replacement, William Perry Pendley, who joined Interior after three decades of suing the federal government to weaken protections for federal lands. Pendley, serving in an “acting” capacity, hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate and perhaps couldn’t be: His Twitter musings are a fevered collection of attacks on Democrats and celebrations of oil and gas drilling.

Pendley, with a Yosemite Sam mustache, informed the House Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday that “we will not dispose of or transfer in a wholesale manner our public lands.”

So they’ll do it piecemeal?

He volunteered that he’s “in full compliance with . . . President Trump’s heightened ethics pledge.”

As if that were reassuring.

He declared that the department is offering “knowledgeable and compassionate assistance” to those relocating. (Last week, he apologized to enraged employees that BLM had been “less than transparent”).

Rep. Diana De Gette (D-Colo.) asked for details on the many unfilled vacancies BLM already has.

“I don’t have that number,” he said.

Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) asked if BLM had studied the lost expertise the move would create.

“No, Mr. Chairman.”

Rep. TJ Cox (D-Calif.) asked for specific details of the relocation.

“I’ll have to defer to congressional and legislative affairs,” Pendley said.

Right. In Reno.

The Trump administration has attempted similar relocations — read: job cuts — at the Agriculture Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Personnel Management and elsewhere. But 85 percent of the federal workforce already is outside the Washington area. And at BLM, which has only a few hundred of its 10,000 employees in Washington, the argument for decentralization is particularly weak. Even BLM’s deputy director of operations, Mike Nedd, told employees last week that “I probably would have made a different decision,” E&E News reported.

But Pendley, at that same meeting, said the administration would push ahead with the plan, even if it doesn’t have sufficient funds — because “we are confident that Congress will provide additional funding.”

Wandering, but not lost.
The only constant is change.

Fourthspartan56from Georgia, US
Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!

Few if any Presidents have ever had polls that so belligerently refuse to change month over month. What this suggests is that the same is true today as it was last year.

Indeed, which is very bad for Trump. He cannot win with just his base and thus his inability to reliably court voters outside of it is not good for his re-election chances. He can still win but that isn't what a candidate who has a high chance of victory looks like.

"Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies."
-Robert Kennedy

Speaking of Trump's approval ratings, Nate Silver had a Tweet couple just yesterday indicating that actually, it may be that they are beginning to give. Perhaps it's the economy, or perhaps death by a thousand cuts as the absence of the "adults in the room" is showing and crises seem to mount.

Three Bolton aides submit their resignations at White House – Three top aides to former national security adviser John Bolton submitted their resignations on Wednesday a day after Bolton and President Donald Trump parted ways.

For those of us unable to look at Twitter, could someone please summarize what the big deal with Warren's tweet was? Kind of hard to glean content when it's literally just talking about how awesome whatever she said was.

It wasn't what Warren said that was important. It was CNBC's stock market people distraught about the effect her presidency would have on Wall Street. You really have to see the clip for yourself to get the full effect.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Sep 11th 2019 at 2:33:13 PM

I need to think of a better signature.

SilaswA procrastination in of itself
from a handcart heading to Hell
Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3

I think it was a clip of stick market people saying they don’t like Warren and that she’d hurt their profits, Warren replied to the clip saying that that’s the point and they should be afraid.

She’s being open about her intention to hurt the stock market so as to help the American people, in her mind the stock market should be afraid, because they’re the bad guys and she going to stop them hurting people.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael
"If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

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